Research On Temporal And Spitial Characteirstics And Decision-Making Process Of Residents’ Shopping Behavior In Wuhu City

As western human geographers has paid more and more attention to actualproblems of human and society, the focuses of urban geography havetransformed from macroscopic level such as research on city system tomicroscopic level such as researches on shopping space, living space,commercial space and so on, and has placed a great emphasis on the compositepower of urban spatial changes, as well as researches on multiplayer physicalspaces such as production, consumption, circulation, innovation,etc. andincorporeal space. At present, China is in a transitional period in which cities’main function are changing from production to consumption, with shoppingbehaviors’ increasing and complication and the transformation of shoppingpatterns as well as their deep influences on Chinese society, economy,institution, culture and so on, residents’ shopping behaviors have become afocus of some subjects such as urban geography, urban sociology and urbaneconomics.The paper chooses Wuhu as a case, obtains relative information with thehelp of field interview and questionnaire, and utilizes means such as statisticanalysis, nested logit model and structure equation model, discusses temporaland spatial characteristics of residents’ shopping behavior and the evolution ofit’s spatial structure. Bases on the shopping activities which have occurred, thepaper makes a thorough analysis of residents’ making process and itsinfluencing factors in many ways such as residents’ information search ofshopping, location choices and the evaluation of shopping destination.The article is divided into three sections:The first part reviews the relevant research progress from home andabroad, introduces research backgrounds, contents, thoughts, methods,technical route and so on, and introduces related conceptions and basictheories. The second part systematically analyzes shopping behaviors of residentsin Wuhu from three aspects:First, through the interview and questionnaires, the paper finds that thereare obvious differences within frequencies of Wuhu residents’ buying differentgoods, shopping activities in rest day are generally more than working days andshopping time of them are also different. From the residents’ shopping tripdistances, we can reach that high-grade goods usually corresponding tohigh-grade spatial circles and there are notable differences in the shoppingactivities of different individuals;Second, the paper constructs the hierarchy model of residents’ shoppingtrip in order to analyze the evolution of the spatial structure of residents’shopping behavior in Wuhu and its driving mechanism. Results show that: inthe past10years, the average shopping distance of Wuhu residents is tend toshorten, and range ability of the shopping distance of household appliances isthe largest; the shopping circling structures and shopping sites of differentgoods present different characteristics, the spatial hierarchy of the shopping triptend to move down, and the daily supplies goods is most obvious; drivingmechanism of the evolution of residents’ shopping spatial structure in Wuhu iscomposed by many factors such as development planning of the commercialnetwork, concentration and diffusion of new business formats, appearances of“jobs-housing mismatching” and “housing-consumption mismatching”,improvement of the transportation conditions, preference of residents’ shoppingdemand and so on.Third, based on the analysis of residents’ shopping decision-makingprocess, through combining shopping activities which have already happened,the paper makes a deconstruction on the decision-making process from aspectsof shopping information search, location choice, time and spatial decision-making of the tour and the evaluation of shopping destination, etc. Besides,utilizing the nested logit model from residents’ shopping travel modedecision-making, shopping initial time decision-making, shopping destinationdecision-making, shopping travel mode decision-making four aspects, thepaper analyzes the influences factors on residents’ decision-making processsuch as living space, employment space and residents’ attributes, etc. Finally,by the construction of structure equation model, considers that the main influencing factors of residents’ shopping decision-making process include thetraffic accessibility of shopping locations, service attitude, commodity price,quality and variety.The third part is the conclusion, summarizes the main conclusions andviews, points out the limitation of the study and further researches in the future.